The Demands of the Dead (11 page)

She was in Salant's email, and thought there was a good chance that there was something in there. And additional attention from the State Department on Hoffman. They wanted me to meet them, and not because they had anything to share, either. I decided the best thing to do would be to avoid them until I was finished in Hatuey.

“Hi honey. Excellent that you got through to my friend. Look forward to hearing from him. Yes, please tell Uncle that while I can't wait to see him and the family, I am quite busy here and will get in touch as soon as my schedule eases up. Meanwhile, No Worries. With love especially to H., S.C.”

As in, I'm still in San Cristobal, headed towards Hatuey, and haven't seen Walter yet. I thanked Raul and put my disk away.

He walked me to the door.“Go shopping and get rest. You’ll need to leave early tomorrow to get there on time.”

Evelyn was still waiting for me, with crossed arms, looking mildly affronted by the long wait.

“Have dinner with me tonight. I live alone,” she said.

I said nothing.

“Do you have everything you need?” she asked, arms still crossed.

The trip to Hatuey was 8 hours long, and she – unlike me – was going to be in the community for two weeks. Observers had to carry their own food, all their own gear.

She was right. I would need to buy some rice and beans.

“No,” I said. Could I meet her later?

She wrote an address in my notebook and kissed me goodbye, rising up on her toes. Soap, perfume, clean laundry scent coming off her clothes. A Mexican custom, performed by a friendly person, not to be read into.

We got out into the street to go our separate ways in the cool, cloudy late afternoon. I saw mountains in every direction, like you could almost everywhere in the state of Chiapas and certainly anywhere in San Cristobal.

Working backwards from Evelyn's dinner, I calculated that I had an hour to wander the markets, take in the sights, and find bargains. I passed through the narrow alleys, sometimes slippery from squashed fruits and vegetables, the low-hanging ropes that held up the tarps and shelters of the booths that I had to duck under, the indigenous women sitting on the cobblestones with small scales in front of them and piles of pears or tomatoes or onions behind. But shopping here was a skill, one that needed practice to tune out the overload of stimulation. I needed to shop mindlessly. So I went to the Mayoreo, the big corporate grocery beside the markets, where I picked up good camp food from American companies. Oats in those individual packets. Chocolate powder. Powdered milk. Sugar, rice, beans, oil. I bought more than I needed – whatever I left behind would find use in the community.

I went back to the hotel room to pack and prepare.

The police and the army line was that they were trying to keep order in a lawless situation where guerrillas and paramilitaries were killing each other over land and drugs. Their theory of the murders was that their cops had been caught in the crossfire between guerrillas and paramilitaries. Or, rather, that one or the other group, it didn’t matter which, had killed the cops to try to drive cops away from their community and activities. That was the theory of the Seguridad Publica brass, both Saltillo and Beltran's, and probably silent Chavez thought that too but he wasn’t telling me.

Marchese, from the American Embassy, blamed the guerrillas. He was training the cops to keep order and he thought the guerrillas wanted to kill cops. That was what they did. They were rebels who were fighting a war with the government.

But neither of these theories explained: why
these
cops? Why Gonzalez and Diaz? Gonzalez’s gun’s irregularities, their scheduling, it all pointed to those two being targeted somehow. Either these rebels and paras were watching the police very closely, and planned the attack accordingly, or some police helped in the murders.

Raul’s theory was sounding more plausible. He said the army, police, and paramilitaries all worked together. They all wanted to destroy the rebellion, slowly and persistently, by making villagers into refugees, having massacres, and imprisoning people. Maybe Gonzalez and Diaz were paramilitaries, who the rebels had targeted for revenge for some reason, some strategic reason?

All the roads were leading to the rebels. But it still seemed like a stupid thing to do for rebels who were so good at publicity. Rebels who my friend was maybe working with. Rebels who would have to be delicately handled, if I was going to get them to talk to me.

I changed my shirt and went to see Evelyn. I bought her a cake on the way. The least I could do, for the woman who was going to lead me to Walter.

Her hair was down and still wet, and she was wearing a white blouse and a knee-length dark blue skirt. She brought me into the courtyard. There were two doors, two apartments it looked like, opening to it. It was small, with some flower beds and a shed, and a bicycle.

She pointed to the door on the right. “That one’s mine... but if you want to sit here a while, while there's still some light?”

“Sure.”

She went inside and brought back a tray with two cups, a bowl for sugar, spoons, a creamer cup, all metal, painted a blue I'd only seen here.

“Coffee?”

She set the tray down beside her and sat next to me on the steps, quite close, and looking right at me.

“I know your secret,” she said.

I didn't believe her. I had done enough interrogations to know this was a standard line of attack – give the suspect the impression that you already know what he did. But even if she knew Walter, even if my friend who had scrupulously kept his identity and even the fact that he was alive a secret from all of his loved ones had decided to tell this stranger everything about us, she couldn't know what I was doing here because Walter didn't. The game could lead somewhere, though, so I would play it out.

“What secret is that?”

“You know things human rights observers shouldn't know and you don't know things they should. You understand the military and police situation but not the politics. You speak Spanish fluently. But you ask questions that every Zapatista solidarity worker knows the answers to. You are making an 8-hour trip to one of the most dangerous occupied communities in the state, but you’re not planning to stay the full two weeks. You are obviously not a cop because Raul wouldn’t have allowed you to go with me. You would still be at your hotel, waiting to find out whether you could go. He would have said something to me.”

“So, what do you conclude?”

Darkness had fallen quickly and we now looked at each other in the flat light of a single bulb behind us on her stoop, shadows playing as moths flitted around the light.

“Come in,” she said.

I picked up the tray and followed her in the dark through a small, ordered living room and kitchen with books - among them a creased, battered 1994 edition of
Malcolm X Speaks
edited by George Breitman - and a laptop computer arranged around the counter, into her room. She turned a light on, pointed to the bed for me to sit down, and reached up high on a bookshelf full of english translations of Latin American literature- Garcia Marquez, Galeano, Allende, Restrepo, Taibo – and pulled down a map.

She sat next to me – very close, again – and unfolded the map on our laps. “We are here,” she said, pointing to San Cristobal. “We are going here,” she said, pointing east and north, to Hatuey, near Palenque. “Where you need to be, to find what you are looking for, is all the way down here.” She pointed to a city called Tapachula at the southeast corner, on the Guatemalan border.

“The murders you're investigating are not about the rebellion. They're about drugs.”

Lucky guess
, I told myself.
She still has nothing
. “Why do you think I'm investigating –?”

“-- And as a journalist,” she said, “you need to smarten up.”

I exhaled. So it had all been lucky guesses and speculation.

“Come with me to Tapachula, after Hatuey. You could learn things you need to know, and I could use the muscle,” she said, touching my arm.

“Tell me more about how I need to smarten up,” I said.

She got up by pushing down on my knee, folded up the map and pointed out to the living room with her head. “Over dinner,” she said.

I'd survived the interrogation and now Evelyn wanted to talk, with all the energy of an expert who has finally found an interested audience. Over salad, she told me that Tapachula was the axis of the Mexican drug trade. Over rice and beans, that it was where cocaine came from Central America through Mexico and on to North America and Europe, and how she thought that Public Security officers and paramilitaries were involved in the trade, which sometimes got violent. And over the pound cake I'd brought, how she was writing a series of stories about it that would involve going there and talking to people, including some dangerous people, which was why she wanted me.
Forget investigation, I could get into discount bodyguarding.

But I knew she had several male friends, including one who was quite capable indeed.

“You can't take anyone from around here?”

“No one can that can go with me right now...”

So, whatever Walter was doing, he was busy.

“Let's see how it goes in Hatuey,” I said.

It was a brisk and cold walk home. A pack of the stray, skinny dogs of San Cristobal tried to chase me, barking, as I passed the cathedral. I barked back at them. They walked away.

Evelyn had impressed me. She was
knowledgeable, capable, experienced, and knew people on this side of the conflict, people I needed to know. It would be a pleasure to work with her, even if spending that much time in close quarters with a clever pretty girl would make me hurt for Maria more than usual and already had. She
also had some natural talent for police work – guessing right that I was a death investigator, even though she had guessed wrong, thinking I was a journalist.

As for my own guesses: I guessed that Walter and her knew each other very well, that he trusted her a great deal, that he had spent nights at her place, was last there just a few days ago, and was planning to come back.

Chapter 5

The book had given it away. When I started reading
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
, Shawn had ranted about how Alex Haley filtered Malcolm's words, how if I really wanted to know Malcolm, I needed to read his speeches directly. The copy of
Malcolm X Speaks
in Evelyn's living room had been in my own room for weeks, in between stints on Shawn's shelf. Walter must have taken it, when he took Shawn's things from his apartment and ran. Walter wouldn't leave a memento like that in just anyone's house: Evelyn was at least a very good friend, if not a girlfriend. And he wouldn't leave a battered paperback, so much more valuable to him than it would be to someone who never knew Shawn, if he had no intention of returning. If he had been at her place today he would have heard my name and I didn't think he would have run away, so I guessed he was out in the jungle somewhere, not planning to return to San Cristobal for days, or weeks. The hard part was over. I could track him down in the jungle, or I could wait for him in San Cristobal. But either way, I would meet him before long. I could pass the time by finding a witness to the murder of Gonzalez and Diaz in Hatuey, earning my expenses and solving Hoffman's murder for him.

I was at Evelyn’s at dawn to catch the first bus to Palenque. From there we’d switch to another bus, then take a minibus the rest of the way.

The military peppered the state, and especially Zapatista territory, with checkpoints to keep track of who was going where. Not a problem when traveling with Chavez and Public Security. I had two options. First, I could pretend to be traveling separately from Evelyn and answer the interrogations separately, allowing me to show Chavez’s letter and endorsement of my free movement if they were being difficult.

Or we could pretend to be a clueless American couple, keeping our conversation inane. Evelyn would lower suspicion of me. I decided to play couple.

The bus stopped for half an hour in Palenque, the cradle of a ruined Mayan civilization. Evelyn knew what highlights a half-hour tour had to include: the skull carving, the waterfall, and the biggest pyramid.

Then we switched to the microbus, and as we sat, it slowly filled up. A couple of older Mexican villagers traveling alone, a younger couple from the city, and a young woman with a five year old boy. When each person got on, they looked at us, hesitated a moment, calculating whether it was worth waiting for the next bus rather than suffer delays at the inevitable checkpoints because there were foreigners on board. But every single one of them chose to stay on, even though the resentment in the air grew incrementally with each Mexican passenger.

The bus left when it was full, and forty five minutes later we were stopped at the inevitable checkpoint, staffed by both young army boys and some plainclothes people from immigration. We spoke English and played dumb. The soldiers took our passports, wrote our names, took our pictures, asked our business—we were going to look for exotic amber jewelry—and let us go without searching us or bothering us further. The limitations of checkpoints. Of course the army already had my information, and I knew they had Evelyn’s too. But not at every checkpoint. Bureaucratic inefficiency would protect me from detection.